Change Idle Session timeout ICX Session Timeout session.timeout

If someone ask Apps DBA to change Session Idle Time out value How & where will you change ?
In order to answer first you have to understand what kind of seesions are in Apps 11i and what is Idle timeout ?
In Apps there are two broad categories of session
- Self Service Application Session ( Server by Web Server iAS Apache & Jserv, like iRecruitment, iProcurement)
-Forms session ( served by your form session, like system Administrator)

What is Session Idle time ?
If Oracle Apps client is not doing any activity for some time (when application user goes for coffee or talks over phone) session during that time is called as Idle Session & because of security reason, performance issues and to free up system resource Oracle Applications terminates client session( both forms & self service) after idle time value is reached to the one mentioned in configuration file.

From FND.G or 11.5.9 or with introduction of AppsLocalLogin.jsp to enter into application, profile option “ICX Session Timeout” is used only to determine Forms Session Idle timeout value . This might be confusing as earlier this profile option used to control forms as well as self service application(with session.timeout) session.timeout is used to control Idle session timeout for Self Service Applications ( Served by Jserv via JVM )

From where ICX : Session Timeout & session.timeout get values ?

Autoconfig determines value for profile option “ICX: Session Timeout” and “session.timeout” from entry in context file ( $APPL_TOP/admin/SID_hostname.xml ) with parameter s_sesstimeout where value mentioned is in milliseconds so profile option ICX: Session Timeout value should be s_sesstimeout/ (1000 * 60) which means here its 10 Minutes. This value is also set in zone.properties in $IAS_ORACLE_HOME/Apache/Jserv where number mentioned is in milli second i.e. 600000 ( equal to 10 Minutes)session.timeout = 600000

session.timeout mentioned in zone.properties is in milli secondsICX Session Time out mentioned in profile option ICX: Session Timeout is in minutes so ICX session timeout=30 & session.timeout= 1800,000 are same 30 minutes

P.S. ICX Session time out was introduced in FND.D so if your FND version is below D you might not see this variable.

Important Things Apps DBA should consider while setting session timeout value ?
1.. If you keep session.timeout value too high , when some oracle application user accessing Self service application terminates his session, so longer idle session will drain JVM resource & can result in Java.Lang No Memory available issues .
2. If you keep it too low, users going out for tea or sitting idle for some time have to login again into application & can be annoying .
Thumb rule is session time out usually set to 30 minutes.

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Source :- http://onlineappsdba.com/index.php/2006/09/01/change-idle-session-timeout-icx-session-timeout-sessiontimeout/

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